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Patrick
2012 Mar 15, 10:25am
You could in theory go to the Santa Clara County office and get all that info for free. But county offices are not usually all that user-friendly.
Let us know if you visit, and whether they'll give you that data, or give you the run-around like they do in San Mateo County.
I once went into the San Mateo County office and asked to see a list of which properties has NODs filed against them. The clerk handed me a pencil, and told me to go to a row of PCs that they had, look up the addresses I was interested in, one by one, and write down the results.
They simply would not give me the list, even though it's obviously a trivial query and theoretically public information.
bmwman91
2012 Mar 16, 2:36am
Hmmmm....
"Hello Mr. Clerk, could you give me the server name, database / table names, and account info for a read-only permissions? Thank you!"
"You want what?"
Maybe I will see about making a couple of calls before I try driving over there.
bmwman91
2012 Mar 16, 2:51am
I think it is a reference of some sort to property tax revenues. The bubble partially popped, making the county broke-as-shit. If the real foreclosure numbers got widely publicized, they would be even more broke-as-shit. Considering how grim the numbers that ARE out look, I wonder what the real ones look like.
RentingForHalfTheCost
2012 Mar 16, 3:10am
They simply would not give me the list, even though it's obviously a trivial query and theoretically public information.
Absolutely, the same experience I had. I also found out from people standing on the auction steps that the county does package and sell the lists to those willing to pay. So much for free access to the information. The dirtiest deals are done right in front of the court house step if you ask me. I spent a month going each day just for fun and was always entertained. ;)
If you read this public page, you can't help but feel the big "F U" in the last few paragraphs. It is all about protecting the property taxes to them. They not only don't want to help with an easy to make list, they advertise for the paid services. That is complete bull about third parties coming in and manually going through the entries to make a database. They sell the list to them! So corrupt, right in front of our eyes. No Shame.
http://www.smcare.org/assessor/homeownerresources/foreclosure.asp
gregpfielding
2012 Mar 16, 3:32am
For what it's worth ForeclosureRadar is probably going to be the most accurate. I've done some consulting work with them over the years and Sean O'Toole explained to me the methodologies that each of the tracking companies uses.
I confess I don't remember the specifics, but FR's approach is definitely the most thorough and weeds out a lot of mistakes that show up in competitors' reports.
It ain't free, but if you are serious about spending $$ on a foreclosure, it's a reasonable monthly investment.
http://foreclosureradar.com/
Great thread.
Yes it is really quite appalling how poor transparency there is around these deals and transactions.
Reading that link RentingForHalfTheCost sent makes me think it is more general ineptitude than a conspiracy to make money, but I may be wrong.
The county should list it all online and also perform the auctions themselves online rather than to people with bundles of cash standing at the courthouse steps. What is this 19th century?
We all love to talk about how unhealthy the housing market is in the Bay Area, but it would be nice to get some actual data into one place here, and try to determine its relevance.
The first place I usually look for a high-level look at what is going on is Hot Pads. Per their map, there are a LOT of SFHs in foreclosure at the moment. Unfortunately, I can't tell what they are defining as "foreclosure", but every little listing icon I checked said that the property was at auction. That seems to be a "real" foreclosure, as opposed to just some funky NOD listing. Here is a screen capture of the Silicon Valley, where most interest seems to be focused. I guess Palo Alto IS doing alright, and Cupertino, not so much.
I am not claiming that this screen shot is hard evidence of anything since I didn't check every single little icon. So, there may be 620+ foreclosures in the area alone...of 1500+ square foot, 2+ BR, 2+ BA SFHs. I left out condos & townhouses since those are just glorified apartments.
OK, so I also checked RealtyTrac for stats, and it says that there are 993 SFHs with the same criteria, available at auction in Santa Clara County. Redfin lists 894 houses with these criteria as for sale (including short sales) in SCC. Where else can one look for foreclosure information? The few sources that I have checked (which may all just be pulling from the same database) all seem to roughly agree.
How accurate are these findings? Is the housing market really as messed up as it would seem, having more houses in FC / at auction than regular / short sales? Where will all of these FC houses go? Institutional investors? Specu-vestors? Honest, hard-working families that want fairly priced houses?
#housing